Drawing Performance in IC5141 with Linux fglrx video driver

T

Tony Bonaccio

Guest
I am using Cadence 5141 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p with the ATI Fire GL
graphics chipset. I am running Linux RHEL 5 with the proprietary fglrx
video drivers from ATI. There's an annoying glitch in the redraw of Cadence
5141 windows with this setup - window redraw delays just long enough to
impact interactions like select, magnify, etc. The delay occurs on any
operation - open a new window, magnify, and so on. I notice it particularly
when opening a new schematic window, for instance, the schematic draws
quickly but the banner menus and sometimes the window boundaries take a
brief but annoying moment to draw. I see this in either KDE/kwin or
Gnome/metacity.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this has to do with the 8-bit pseudocolor
legacy. I have pseudocolor visuals disable and have tried the -use24
command line switch with no noticeable improvement. If I turn on the 8-bit
pseudocolor I see very strange window corruption. I have used IC61 a little
and don't see this problem at all.

Anyone experiencing anything similar? Any fixes or optimizations for this
kind of behavior? Thanks in advance.

Tony Bonaccio
Burlington, VT
 
On Aug 19, 6:59 pm, "Tony Bonaccio" <tony_b@attglobal_dot_net> wrote:
I am using Cadence 5141 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p with the ATI Fire GL
graphics chipset. I am running Linux RHEL 5 with the proprietary fglrx
video drivers from ATI. There's an annoying glitch in the redraw of Cadence
5141 windows with this setup - window redraw delays just long enough to
impact interactions like select, magnify, etc. The delay occurs on any
operation - open a new window, magnify, and so on. I notice it particularly
when opening a new schematic window, for instance, the schematic draws
quickly but the banner menus and sometimes the window boundaries take a
brief but annoying moment to draw. I see this in either KDE/kwin or
Gnome/metacity.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this has to do with the 8-bit pseudocolor
legacy. I have pseudocolor visuals disable and have tried the -use24
command line switch with no noticeable improvement. If I turn on the 8-bit
pseudocolor I see very strange window corruption. I have used IC61 a little
and don't see this problem at all.

Anyone experiencing anything similar? Any fixes or optimizations for this
kind of behavior? Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
There is a support matrix to be found on the www.cadence.com homepage:
http://www.cadence.com/support/computing/support_platform.aspx. This
states that IC5141 is only supported for RHEL3. If you ask support at
Cadence they will tell you that RHEL4 should work ok. If you take a
look at http://www.cadence.com/support/computing/Cadence_Platform_Support_Plan.pdf
you will see that RHEL5 is not going to be supported for x86 at all in
2008, only x86_64. This support plan is the reason why I have to work
with an old version of linux on my workstation without any of the nice
new versions of KDE etc.

You could try to experiment with turning on backingstore in your X11.
Put an option "Backingstore" in your Screen module and hope for the
best . On the other side, we have also had problems with the ATI
drivers. It is a paradox that the making of the newest bleeding edge
hardware has to make use of old hardware to run the tools to make it,
but Cadence has at least seen the light and switched to Qt for their
newer releases, that's probably why you don't have any problems with
6.1

As far as I know, the only thing that needs the 8-bit pseudo color is
the splash screen for icfb. Try to start it with icfb -nosplash if
that is what keeps it from starting.

--
Svenn
 
You might also check into VMware or Xen. With it, you can run CentOS5
(RHEL5) on your laptop. This will give you the advantage of a newer
Linux system with the latest drivers, kernel, gcc/glib, etc. Within
that environment, you can run a CentOS3/4 (RHEL3/4) environment to make
Cadence happy.

The software is free for a single install.

I've not personally tried this, but it should work. ;-)

I tend to use 2 boxes: A Windows PC for Outlook and Office, running a
PC-X server. The graphics are exported from a remote Linux machine. NO
Machine (NX) is a great solution, especially for low-bandwidth
connections. This gives you the best of both worlds: the graphics
driver maturity of a Windows box (which is essential for big displays)
and the performance benefit of a Linux box.

HTH,

Trevor

Svenn Are Bjerkem wrote:
On Aug 19, 6:59 pm, "Tony Bonaccio" <tony_b@attglobal_dot_net> wrote:
I am using Cadence 5141 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p with the ATI Fire GL
graphics chipset. I am running Linux RHEL 5 with the proprietary fglrx
video drivers from ATI. There's an annoying glitch in the redraw of Cadence
5141 windows with this setup - window redraw delays just long enough to
impact interactions like select, magnify, etc. The delay occurs on any
operation - open a new window, magnify, and so on. I notice it particularly
when opening a new schematic window, for instance, the schematic draws
quickly but the banner menus and sometimes the window boundaries take a
brief but annoying moment to draw. I see this in either KDE/kwin or
Gnome/metacity.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this has to do with the 8-bit pseudocolor
legacy. I have pseudocolor visuals disable and have tried the -use24
command line switch with no noticeable improvement. If I turn on the 8-bit
pseudocolor I see very strange window corruption. I have used IC61 a little
and don't see this problem at all.

Anyone experiencing anything similar? Any fixes or optimizations for this
kind of behavior? Thanks in advance.

There is a support matrix to be found on the www.cadence.com homepage:
http://www.cadence.com/support/computing/support_platform.aspx. This
states that IC5141 is only supported for RHEL3. If you ask support at
Cadence they will tell you that RHEL4 should work ok. If you take a
look at http://www.cadence.com/support/computing/Cadence_Platform_Support_Plan.pdf
you will see that RHEL5 is not going to be supported for x86 at all in
2008, only x86_64. This support plan is the reason why I have to work
with an old version of linux on my workstation without any of the nice
new versions of KDE etc.

You could try to experiment with turning on backingstore in your X11.
Put an option "Backingstore" in your Screen module and hope for the
best . On the other side, we have also had problems with the ATI
drivers. It is a paradox that the making of the newest bleeding edge
hardware has to make use of old hardware to run the tools to make it,
but Cadence has at least seen the light and switched to Qt for their
newer releases, that's probably why you don't have any problems with
6.1

As far as I know, the only thing that needs the 8-bit pseudo color is
the splash screen for icfb. Try to start it with icfb -nosplash if
that is what keeps it from starting.

--
Svenn
Click to expand...
 
Thanks Trevor and Sven Are for the responses. Sounds like there are no
magic tweaks to fglrx to get it running properly with Cadence. I have
experimented with the Backing Store and Save Under settings with no real
change either way. I have heard recently that turning off quad buffer
stereo (a gaming setting) may help performance so I am going to try that
next. If that doesn't help, another thing I want to look at is just the
open-source ati or radeon drivers. I could conceivably load these up for
sessions during which I am going to be using IC5141 (which is most of the
time) then fall back to the fglrx driver when I need 3D or IC61.

Thanks again,
Tony Bonaccio
Burlington ,VT, USA
 
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